Together with his inexperienced crewmate, Ezequiel Córdoba, he was 50 miles out at sea, slowly negotiating a route back to shore. He was a veteran captain and knew that he needed to regain the initiative. An inexperienced navigator might have panicked, started baling and been distracted from his primary task: aligning the boat with the waves. O n 18 November 2012, a day after being ambushed at sea by a massive storm, Alvarenga was trying to ignore the growing pond of seawater sloshing at his feet. Over the course of more than 40 interviews, he described his extraordinary survival at sea. Later, I would sit with Alvarenga for many hours, back at his home in El Salvador, as he described in detail the brutal realities of living at sea for more than a year. When he washed ashore (in the same boat that he had left Mexico on), thousands of miles away, he was steadfast in his rejection of interviews – even posting a note on his hospital door begging the press to disappear. It turned out there were dozens of witnesses who had seen Alvarenga leave shore, who had heard his SOS. I was sceptical, but as a Guardian reporter in the region, I began to investigate.

Who survives 14 months at sea? Only a Hollywood screenwriter could write a tale in which such a journey ends happily. Briefly, Alvarenga became a household name. The photo of the bearded fisherman shuffling ashore went viral. Several observers noted a similarity to the Tom Hanks character in the movie Cast Away. Alvarenga cracked a quick smile and waved to the cameras. Expecting a gaunt and bedridden victim, a ripple of disbelief went through the crowd. Dressed in a baggy brown sweatshirt that disguised his reedy torso, he disembarked from a police boat slowly but unaided. I was so hungry that I was eating my own fingernails, swallowing all the little pieces Salvador Alvarengaĭays later, Alvarenga faced the world’s press. But surviving in a vibrant world of wild animals, vivid hallucinations and extreme solitude did little to prepare him for the fact that he was about to become an international celebrity and an object of curiosity. Floating across the Pacific Ocean, watching the moon’s light ebb and flow for over a year, Alvarenga had battled loneliness, depression and bouts of suicidal thinking.

Jonathan franklin 438 days